US Dept. of Homeland Security Awards $750K to Digital Bazaar

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) has awarded a $749,241 grant to Digital Bazaar to develop fit-for-purpose blockchains for identity and access management. The funding was part of DHS’ 13 Phase II contracts through the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program.

Founded in 2004, Virginia-based Digital Bazaar is a verifiable claims and fit-for-purpose decentralized ledgers. The company develops technology, services, and products that help integrate linked data, identity, and payments into the core architecture of the web.

Under the contract, Digital Bazaar will develop a flexible software ecosystem that combines fit-for-purpose distributed ledger technology (DLT), digital credentials, and digital wallets to address a wide variety of identity management and online access use cases for the Homeland Security Enterprise (HSE). This research and development (R&D) project is being managed by the Cyber Security Division’s (CSD) Identity Management project. CSD is part of the Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Digital Bazaar’s project titled “Fit-for-Purpose Blockchains/Identity and Access Management” will build on its current platform to develop a standards-based digital credentialing solution coupled with a fit-for-purpose blockchain that will provide the new capabilities. Once completed, the enhanced product will be positioned as a Ledger As A Service (LaaS) platform. Digital Bazaar will deploy the LaaS platform in several HSE pilot projects to demonstrate its capability.

S&T Identity Management Program Manager Anil John said that current blockchain implementations do not use any type of open standards to describe the data they work with. At the same time, scalable deployment requires such inter-operability. He said that this blockchain project will deliver a solution that uses open standards developed via existing worldwide standards development organizations to ensure inter-operability across blockchain implementations.